Meet the Faces Behind Your Favorite Food Brands

Are you the kind of person who eats Justin’s peanut butter by the spoonful? Or maybe your pantry is always stocked with an array of Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flours. If so, then you’ve probably wondered about the people behind these supermarket staples.In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, eight business owners open up about how they turned their passion for eating well into a recipe for success.

As a longtime vegetarian, Justin Gold, 41, was always on the hunt for delicious ways to add protein to his diet. When he couldn’t find good nut-butter options in the store, he began making his own butters at home in a food processor but quickly ran into a problem: “My roommates would eat them all,” he says with a laugh. “So I had to write ‘Justin’s’ on all the jars.” While working as a waiter in 2004, he started selling four nut-butter flavorsat his local farmers’ market. They were a hit, and his company took off. In 2016 he sold Justin’s, which now makes over 30 items (including the first organic peanut butter cup), to Hormel Foods for $286 million—but he still feels connected to his customers. “It’s really neat when somebody tastes our product for the first time and goes, ‘Wow, this is great!’”